


Pavlov's Dogs and the Atheist's Geometer

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: Leven Thumps and the Gateway to Foo
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-10-08
Updated: 2006-10-08
Packaged: 2017-10-30 22:22:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/336802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Winter has a funeral to miss.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pavlov's Dogs and the Atheist's Geometer

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for an overabuse of italics.
> 
> Spoilers for the Gateway to Foo and The Whispered Secret only. You can read this here or [@ LJ](http://veritasrecords.livejournal.com/36646.html).

-

 

If asked to, Winter could create an exact duplicate of the tower. She could recreate it right down to the little figure of a girl with red dye bleeding down her face on her knees in the skylit room, every little detail spun out from the crevices in her mind.

She stands on a street corner at the corners of Maa and Salastine in the City of Geth, and buries her toes into the gap made by the uneven concrete (it grumbles at her, but she has long since learned that sidewalks usually have very little to say that's worth hearing), with the stars shooting back and forth overhead in their glee, and she idly wonders if the temperature is divisible by seven.

She wants Lilly to be there, all of a sudden. Life was a lot lonelier in Foo, now that Geth had been restored and the war became so much more bigger than just her and Leven and Clover listed under Only Hope.

But she didn't know where Lilly was, and without Clover to ask... well, without Clover.

She wriggles her toes in the earth between the slabs of concrete, and knows in the way only nits do that Geth is waiting for her.

The looks he gives her are different now, still alive and dancing with memory but not quite so smoldering, so wanton and fiery. Winter doesn't remember what merits the looks, in whatever capacity they may be, but by the way the blood in her thighs turns hot and tight whenever his eyes meets hers, she has a fairly good idea, and it's gotten to the point where she looks away when he looks at her. Which isn't all that often anymore. As a man, as a king, as a hero in a war that hasn't been fought yet and already lost and won on several accounts, Geth had more important things to concern himself with than Winter and the company she keeps.

Kept.

She turns and walks in the opposite direction.

She has a funeral to miss.

~~~

_"Couldn't you have imagined something a little cooler?" Leven jibes easily, leaning back into the LeBaron's vinyl and propping his feet up on the dashboard. His shoes don't match. She doesn't care. "I mean, you're the master dream manipulator here."_

_"Sure," she replies flippantly. "I'll just melt the ice and we'll see how good the SeaLab technology is on this edition."_

_"No!" Leven yelps, and she laughs. He looks at her, her snow-white hair just barely blowing up off her cheeks from the air conditioning and her evergreen eyes sparkling, visibly taking a moment to decide if she was really pulling his leg or not. Then he laughs, a fair few octaves below her._

_She lets her hands slide down to her lap and the car's wheels spin on textured ice and she studies Leven's face, as if she didn't have every detail committed to memory by now. His hair, twice as long as it had been earlier that week and curling thick around his shoulders, the white streak glowing almost as fiercely as his eyes, constantly lamp-light gold and difficult to look at for long periods of time. His face, drawn thin over his cheekbones and too pale. His body, aged five years in five days. Not the boy she had seen throw a few stray bolts at two pimply teenagers, but the man who had brought an entire tower of evil to its knees in one strike._

_Evil._

_"They're going to kill me," she whispers, and her hands that are not on the wheel clutch at her jeans, which won't bunch up into her fists. "They're going to kill me."_

_"I know," is all he says, soft and sad and low and his hands clench too, as if he truly believed he could stop it all, the wheels he set in motion spinning, spinning on textured ice. Then he reaches out for her, long fingers crooking around the back of her neck and then her mouth is meshed with his. Her lips are different and her hands are different, softer and younger, but this never changes. The funny noises and the gearshift hard against her back._

_She might have cried, at one point, her face buried in Leven's neck and she doesn't know what to tell him. She doesn't know how to explain that he's the only one who ever looks at her and doesn't see the crimes she's committed._

_But he's gone, leaving only cool air like the breath of the whispered secret that devoured him, and she is alone in the car in the middle of the ocean._

_Nits aren't supposed to dream._

~~~

If asked to, Winter could recount every detail about that night in that tower. In fact, she already has. Well, not everything. Some things she kept to herself, like the sight of Leven in mismatched shoes being one of the funniest thing she's ever seen and the fast, hot kiss he gave her shutting her right up.

But she does tell them about the machine, stiff with metal and glittering with the power she bestowed in it. She does tell them about it sucking her gift right out of her, like being held against the wall and having her arm ripped out by the socket. She tells them about Leven's arrival, nineteen years old and stark with the stench of overwhelming power. She tells them exactly how he saved the world.

Still, every memory of Lev, alive with lightning and burning black like a sun-dried duft, melts within her mind into images of Sabine, and her mind flares and she wants to retch.

"Winter Frore, the Council of the Want hereby find you guilty of treason and conspiracy with the enemies Sabine and Jamoon, directly resulting in the illegal trafficking of metals and the loss of nit gifts. We have discussed your voluntary departure to Reality to aid the one Leven Thumps, but it has not been found satisfactory. The Council of the Want find you, as a mortal and as a giftless nit unable to enhance dreams, useless to Foo and to the purpose we serve. You are to die."

Janet shrieked, but being a whisp, it sounded like a fan had just coughed up something unpleasant. Geth moaned, grasping the rail until his knuckles were white, his throat straining as if he wanted to scream 'no' but it just wouldn't make it. Winter heard neither noise, since the roar of the general assembly drowned them both out.

She stands, silent, as the cogs bind her wrists and lead her out.

~~~

_Her lips are different and her hands are different, but she is sure her legs around his waist are just as warm as they always have been._

_"I don't think I've ever thanked you properly for giving us the means to destroy all of Foo," Sabine says, leaving her listless and languid on the empty board table in the meeting hall of the Council of Whisps, her toes curling against the wood and her hair spread like thin silvery webs around her head. He pours himself a glass of some buttery yellow liquid, smug and self-satisfied._

_"Too bad that Lev killed you and destroyed your machine," Winter replied sweetly, propping herself up on her elbows. "Oh, and you know, it's a pity that you lost the war and all."_

_Sabine's look turns poisonous, and he snaps at her, "There will be others. The rants deserve to be whole. I was merely striving--"_

_"Spare me," says Winter, still dripping sugar. "You were only thinking of yourself."_

_Sabine smirks, leaning over and chucking her gently under the chin. "Oh, but you like thinking of me, too."_

_"Look on the bright side," she purrs, delicately running her knee up his ribs and ignoring his blatant innuendo. "Soon I'll be dead and you'll get to spend all of eternity with me and my brilliant ideas."_

_He sets the glass down and leans over her, hands planted firmly on either side of her shoulders, his raven-black hair sleeked back and his eyes sparkling like venom. "Just like old times, Winter Frore."_

_And then his tongue is somewhere in the back of her throat and she only wishes she were dreaming._

~~~

If asked to, Winter can tell you exactly what she was thinking when they built the tower in the first place. But no one has asked her, because nobody wants to hear that all she wanted to do was give cogs the same gifts their parents had. Nobody cares that all she wanted was to destroy the social barriers between nits and rants and cogs, and even lithens and offings to some degree. But at that time, Winter had only known one lithen and had only heard of offings, and now even the mere mention of either makes her tear up.

Fortunately, Tim Tuttle never told his wife and children the entire story, and she isn't forced to tell any stories she doesn't want to.

She stands at the corner of the street, underneath a clear-blue sky. Her toes dig into the uneven concrete. Darcy props a foot up on the dashboard of his convertible, merely watching her, hair just barely being blown off his cheeks by the air conditioning. Beside him, Rochester tucks his chin onto his elbow, which is slung casually over the passenger side door.

"I love this place," she tells them, turning her head to watching a grizzled old man struggle to get his lawnmower up the massive hill of his front yard. He had to be the only man in all of Iowa put together with a steep piece of anything. The sweat was cool in her hair and the exhaust drifting from the car warmed her legs, and she couldn't imagine winding up anywhere else.

Burnt Culvert, maybe. But that was a train come and gone.

"You didn't used to," says Rochester, blinking soulful brown eyes and looking eight instead of eighteen. "Dad had to bring you back."

"Your dad saved my life," she replies, earning her twin smiles, because it was even truer than they know. She hadn't had to beg Tim to tell his family nothing, the day he sprung her out of jail and sent her through the portal he and Sabine had created three years before. He had automatically made something up about a beautiful little paradise in Germany, and when they were done laughing and crying in relief by turns, Wendy and Darcy and Rochester demanded to know why she ever left.

Wendy figured it out, a few days later, when she pulled a positive pregnancy test out of the trash.

It was easy to cover up. A couple phone calls, a letter to Terry and Addy Graph, and a few pamphlets later, Winter was just another teen statistic living in Midwestern America, a thin, pale girl with evergreen eyes and snow-white hair, with a murder charge under her belt and her stomach swelling with a child touched by Foo.

She shakes her head and turns, leaping nimbly into the backseat of the convertible, careful not to wake the little girl curled up with her little pink rabbit crooked in her elbow and her sandy hair spread all out over the middle seat. "Hey, Lilly," she whispers, brushing some of it back behind the little lithen's ears.

"Drive," she tells Darcy, and he obeys.

~~~

_"Hey, Winter, I bet I can make you move using the Force," laughs Leven, bright and happy and almost glittering. Clover's hanging upside down from his ear like some gigantic, misshapen earring._

_"Oh, I'm sure," she fires back, fast and hot and almost glittering._

_He extends his hand towards her, feigning severe concentration. Then, so suddenly she doesn't have time to realize what he's doing, he's licking his hand and shoving it right into her face, making her rear back in alarm. She realizes a moment later she's proven his point, and shoves him in retaliation, and he hooks his fingers into the loops of her jeans and pulls her to him, and their mouths meet somewhere in the middle and she doesn't think it's enough._

_It'll never be enough, and suddenly, she's spinning in Geth's arms, and he has eyes only for her and she knows why now. The bridge she was under has melted into the dank of her jail cell, and the stone against her back is slightly damp but she doesn't care. She likes Geth like this, hands roaming up the notches in her spine one-by-one and tracing the line of her collarbone with his lips._

_"I know you, Winter, and I know you're innocent," he tells her, and she thinks his eyes look like Lilly's._

_"You're amazing," says Sabine, and his fingers comb through her hair. Above her, the tower spirals into nothing, and his oily eyes are almost smiling at her. It's like he's proud of her, like he's thinking of her brilliance itself and not what it can do for him. "I think your plan might actually work."_

_"I wish it hadn't," she tells him, and his lips curve into a smirk._

_"You know what?" he brushes his fingertips over the buttons of her blouse and lets his lips hover over hers. "So do I."_

~~~

If asked to, Winter wouldn't change a thing.

 

-  
fin


End file.
